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Friday, April 20, 2012

Cardboard Aquarium

Our outdoor plans were shelved on a stormy Saturday afternoon. To keep 2 active boys occupied, we have to come up with something interesting. I always try to reuse any packaging for our crafts and with a new toy ramp, we have 2 self standing cardboards that's very suitable to make an aquarium. We also have some scraps of foam left from a Foam Art pack that they received from my friend. Perfect!

Materials Needed:
Cardboards (any, I used whatever I have from the new toy packaging)
Foam sheets (keep the scraps from those foam art sets if you happen to make)
Colored Paper
Feathers
Glitter
Paint and Brush

These are just some ideas. I took whatever I can find from my craft shelve.

We started painting the cardboard.

While waiting for the paint to dry, I cut out some fish shapes from the foam scraps and got them to use markers to draw the eyes. I cut more small black dots for them to paste on some of them as eyes too.

Add glue and glitter to the fishes.

Paint is still wet and we did some tearing, great for fine motor skills

Finally, the paint dried and they started pasting. It wasn't as messy as the foam sheets were self adhesive. I love that though they really love glue more.

It slipped my mind that K's group in school was doing Fish as the theme for the term. He was going to the Underwater World at Sentosa for his field trip. He was so excited and brought his aquarium craft proudly to school on the excursion day for his teacher. Y, though in the other group was allowed to go along and he also brought his aquarium to school as he wanted to give it to his teacher who left.

My husband couldn't stop complaining about the ugly fish shapes I cut. Ok, I admit it was a sloppy job. But to be honest, for someone who is bad at Art, it's actually not too bad! But I like how imperfect the craft looks. The colors and placement were all the boys' own effort. When I see a perfect children's craft, I often wonder who did it.